Comparison: Dover Beach And Do

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could easily be the local bartender in any town. He indulges a listener and begins to tell a tale about a woman whose only thought about her time on the cliffs of Dover with Matthew was how nice his whiskers would have felt on her neck. In the original poem the girl is there with Matthew but barely mentioned because he is too wrapped up in his own thoughts to notice her. In the parody, however, the woman is the main subject of the poem but ironically enough she is not there. This is the crux of how the original’s introspection is debased. There is not even a hint of self-reflection in the parody; it is simply a man talking about a woman he knows and turning her into some sort of flighty creature who cares nothing about deep thoughts.
Looking back on "Dover Beach," one could ponder if Matthew Arnold was a novice philosopher, simply because that is what philosophers do best: introspect. Each line in "Dover Beach" is overflowing with "deep thoughts." One might ask if Matthew ...

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it is just because a word like that doesn't really say much, and most poetic verses have each word strategically placed to the point that even words like "is" have a meaning. The fact that Hecht uses "etc." more than once further reinforces the shallowness and inconsideration that makes up Matthew Arnold.
Another subtlety about the way this satire is written is how none of the lines are actually thoughts. In the original poem, each line starts with a capital letter and ends in a particular place. However in the parody, although each line begins with a capital letter, there seems to be no real meaning to the lines, because they just end in any place. This whole lack of meaning ...

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